The Imaginary Casey Means
Yes, there is a fight right now among MAHA activists. Yes, it has to do with the announcement on May 7 2025 that “wellness influencer” and bestselling author Casey Means was replacing Dr Janette Nesheiwat as President Trump’s nominee for the office of Surgeon General. Dr Nesheiwat, it emerged, had misrepresented her medical credentials.
A post by former Vice Presidential Candidate Nicole Shanahan, without whose financial and strategic support for RFK Jr’s candidacy, neither he nor President Trump would be in power right now, has been widely circulated. Shanahan found it “strange” that a direct assurance to her from RFK Jr, in exchange for her support for his confirmation, that neither Casey nor her brother Calley Means would be brought to serve in HHS, was disregarded.
There is a lot of condescension — unfortunately, much of it male — that followed the expressions of outrage from key MAHA voices, many of them female. The @SecKennedy account on X called criticisms of Casey Means by MAHA voices, “absurd”. This is a terrible tone in which to address the serious concerns of a base that has fought for this leader and supported him.
Calley Means, for his part, Casey Means’ brother, has been insulting. He used sarcasm to assign to me, as just one example of the regrettable reaction to MAHA outrage, views I do not hold:
I never said, contrary to this unfortunate post, that Casey Means “must be” part of “a CIA plot.” I never said that “the deep state” had anything to do with her meteoric rise to national prominence.
I said — and I stand by every word — that it looks to me as if both Casey Means and Calley Means have been sent to us by scarier interests than the CIA.
Silicon Valley is scarier than any government agency, and far more powerful. The Means siblings, I maintain, are representing Silicon Valley’s interests, and not ours.
I said — and again, I stand by every word — that they both appear to be tasked with representing Big Tech’s interests in the rush to exploit the gold mine that is the pristine, valuable data — especially our private medical data – that is currently held behind secure doors by the United States Government.
I made this point in my February 12 2025 essay about what I saw as Elon Musk’s targeting of our data at that time. The essay was titled “The Sack of Rome.” I warned then that Musk and other Silicon Valley oligarchs were after this data, and that President Trump’s team did not seem to understand the grave and irrevocable risks this mission represented.
I knew then, from my own experience as a tech CEO, that Musk would certainly use his own AI or code (and not only our sovereign government-owned AI) on our datasets. He did, one month later. I knew then that Musk’s team would seek to merge the datasets of multiple agencies (as they sought to do, later).
Anyone who works with technologists would know that these dangerous, destructive actions would be inevitable, because of the value to Musk’s AI that training it on our datasets represents, and because of the value to Musk’s ability to create an “everything app”, that merging datasets from multiple agencies, would represent.
I warned in that essay, and also on Bannon’s War Room podcast, that the Trump administration was facing a catastrophic security risk, via Musk seeking out email communications from national security and intelligence agencies about “five things I did this week.” I knew that Musk’s goal was to create a database of those emails. Those communications, I warned, could be machine-read and turned into a non-secure non-internal database containing our nation’s most important intelligence projects. I may well have been right: “Three sources with “knowledge of the system” reported to NBC that the responses are fed into a Large Language Model to determine “whether someone’s work is mission critical or not.”’
In at least two cases, DOGE has either rewritten its own code into government AI, or it has hosted sensitive government funding activity on a third party — Microsoft — platform.
I warned on WarRoom about the terrible national security risk represented by the administration using any third party platform. I was worried then about Musk’s AI, and about Musk having fired those US government technologists whose job would be to warn about the dangers to national, and to information, security, from what Musk was doing.
A month later, the Signal scandal broke — and our vital national security secrets, including details communicated by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth about the timing of a military strike in Yemen — were all over…. a third party digital platform.
How could the administration have been protected from these appalling security breaches? A third of the US Digital Service tech experts, the ones who would have understood cybersecurity breaches, had been fired via an anonymous email; 21 others resigned, in a letter to the White House on February 25 2025, that blisteringly warned that the data of the United States Government could no longer be secured:
“DOGE’s actions — firing technical experts, mishandling sensitive data, and breaking critical systems — contradict their stated mission of “modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity,” the letter states. “These actions are not compatible with the mission we joined the United States Digital Service to carry out: to deliver better services to the American people through technology and design. […]
We will not use our skills as technologists t
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
